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Monday, October 27, 2014

Oh my goodness! What a busy year this is turning out to be. I'm not alone in that, right? I feel as though I barely have time to sit at a computer to get my school paperwork done, never mind create new materials. But, I did get into a creative mood the other night! I started looking at some clip-art I had purchased a while ago, but never did anything with and here's the result...

I had purchased some fairy tale clip-art from Scrappin' Doodles and thought to myself "What would happen if those fairy tales got mixed together (think the TV show "Once Upon a Time")? What would their conversations look/sound like?

Of course, as an SLP, I thought about the pragmatic implications of the conversations, but really there is so much more that could be targeted here!

In this free download, there are several mixed-up story conversation starters. Read the situations on the cards and have students discuss how the conversation might continue. You could also discuss the appropriateness of the actions of the characters within each scene. Here's a sample scene:

Monday, September 22, 2014

My buddy Shannon over at Speechy Musings is hosting a "Speech Room Staples" linky party! One of my goals for this school year is to get back to blogging and I figured this is the perfect opportunity for me to start up again. Check out her original post and some other link-ups HERE.

I really can't say enough about this. I've been using the overall screening portion included to gather baseline data on my language students. I love that it includes pretty much all of my most common IEP objectives as well...perfect for gathering information at progress report time!

These are just great for a quick therapy activity when introducing a new sound or reviewing a mastered sound. If you're working in a group, you can focus on drill with one student at a time while the rest are coloring their pictures. They are perfect for home practice as well!

If you haven't noticed my theme here, most of my go-to activities are black and white. I'm splitting my time between two schools this year and I need to be highly portable! I love this language dice game for a few reasons, most notably that there are a ton of different targets. Also, I can snap a picture of a page using my iPad (or screenshot from DropBox) and open in the Doodle Buddy app. The students can mark off their items right on the iPad and I never needed to make a trip to the copy machine!

I like these because I have two options...I can grab dot markers or stickers and use the black and white version. Or I can print/laminate the full color sheets and use my bingo chips and magnetic wand. The kids love these activities and I can use them with any target!

2. Feed the Penguin Activities:

I know this probably looks more seasonal than most of the others and you might be thinking, "How can a seasonal item be a speech room staple?" Well, kids just love to feed things! You can print different animals for the kids to feed (like the shark I printed to go with a fish/shark book):

I actually have three different Feed the Penguin Activities in my TPT store. Here are the links:

Monday, June 16, 2014

Time for my monthly (or so) check-in. ;) Boy have I been busy with Jamberry work and end of the school year goings-on, but I wanted to share some fun books and another activity for those of you who are still in school or working summer school!

Summer is a great time to play with Bubbles! I found these adorable books on Amazon and I've been using them in some of my sessions:

I've noticed that my students this year have really struggled with categories - especially naming a category when given members of the category. So, I developed this activity.

There are bubble wand cards that each have 3 category members each:

Then there are bubble container cards with a category name:

There are a few different ways you can use this activity.

First, you can use the bubble wand cards separately. Shuffle and have students draw a card. They can read the three members and try to come up with the category.

You could also use the bubble container cards separately. Shuffle and have students draw a card. They can read the category name and try to name a specified number of members.

Another way to use the bubble container cards would be to divide students into teams. One card is drawn and teams take turns naming a member of the category until one team can no longer think of a member. Once that happens, the other team gets the point.

Use both sets of cards together, mix them up and play a Memory Game.

There is also a game board to increase motivation during your sessions:

My kids love bubbles and I've been using actual bubbles as a reinforcement for this activity. You can download for FREE in my TPT store! As always, please leave feedback if you download! :)

Sunday, April 6, 2014

You may have heard by now that April is Autism Awareness month. Did you know that Jamberry nails has an Autism Awareness wrap? Yup, we do, and $2 from every sale goes to the Autism Society of America! I used it as an accent nail with Jamberry's Cardinal Lacquer...

I know that many of you have students (or children) with Autism, so I wanted to host a giveaway. I'm raffling off a half-sheet of these Autism Awareness wraps (9 wraps total, enough for a full manicure and possibly a full pedicure too)!

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Hello! Long time, no see!! I feel like I'm so out of the blog loop lately! I've been busy at work and at home and I just have to say that I'm so grateful that other bloggers have been creating some amazing materials to make my planning life so much easier! I've been ALL about the no-print and no-color-ink products that my bloggy buddies have created! They've made my life so much easier!

I'm starting to plan for the spring now and I wanted to share some print and go worksheets I made for mixed groups!

There are three different worksheets that are designed to be used with various targets and in mixed groups. There are 6 spaces on which to write targets for the student. Students will roll a die and complete the task on the corresponding line (e.g., say a target word, provide a definition, provide a synonym, etc.). If correct, they can color a portion of the picture that corresponds to the number they rolled.

Each of the three worksheets has a different level of difficulty. The Easter Egg Sheet has one space to color per number/target:

The Bunny Sheet has two spaces per number/target:

The Easter Basket has 5 spaces per number/target:

The Easter basket is probably your best choice for articulation practice so that your students can get multiple productions in a session!

I’ve done a few posts now where I’ve mentioned my student learning goal and professional practice goals for the Educator Evaluation that many districts have adopted. A decent number of people have asked me to share some information regarding my SLG and PPG. Last year was the first year my district used this evaluation method. In effort to stagger plans, some of us were to develop 1-year plans and others developed 2-year plans. I was on the one-year plan. This is good for you because I’ve now had to write TWO plans!

If you’re new to my page, I just want you to be aware that the majority of my caseload consists of preschool students. Because of that, you might not choose to work on the same goals, but they should give you an idea for your own goals!

For the 2012-2013 school year, I had a number of preschool students who had significantly reduced Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). I decided to select a cohort of students who had an MLU of less than or equal to 2.0 for my SLG. I'm not sure if other districts have the same type of plan, but we are required to submit our SLG and PLG for approval, then create a plan that includes action steps. This is a basic outline of that plan. The "due dates" of the steps are included in parenthesis.

Student Learning Goal:

By June 2013, 80% of an identified cohort of students with a BOY Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes (MLU-M) of less than or equal to 2.0 will increase their MLU-M to 3.5 or greater as measured by language sampling.

Action Steps:

1. Obtain language samples and calculate BOY MLU (By 9/30/12).

*BOY = Beginning Of Year

2. Identify cohort of students with MLU of less than or equal to 2.0 (By 10/30/12)

3. Implement activities to target the following morphological structures/sentence types:

4. To demonstrate effectiveness, by Progress Reporting Period 2 (March 2013), 80% of students in the cohort should see an increase in MLU to 2.75 or greater.

5. For each student in the established cohort, I will provide home activities for parents to complete to facilitate carry-over of skills at least 4x/student during the 2012-2013 school year.

*2 activities sent by 2/28/13
*1 activity sent by 4/30/13
*1 activity sent by 6/20/13

Professional Practice Goal:

I will increase my content knowledge of Evidence Based Practice in the area of increasing MLU in preschool students by researching methods and establishing 4 different activities based on those methods by June 2013.

Action Steps:

1. Research evidence-based instructional strategies that target increasing MLU in preschool-aged students. Identify a minimum of two instructional strategies for use in therapy.

Also, you can find information on the FIVES criteria on Speech Techie's site.

I'm on a 2-year plan now, so my timelines will look a little bit different. However, my caseload does change every year, so I wanted to reflect that! For this go-around, I chose a cohort of students on an IEP for language delays/disorders (e.g., NOT articulation). I also selected students in the 4-year old program that will be going to kindergarten in the next school year.

Student Learning Goal:

By the end of each academic year, 75% of students in an identified cohort (language delayed/disordered students in the 4-year old preschool program) will demonstrate an increase in vocabulary and describing skills (using the Expanding Expression Tool) to be able to state 5 or more attributes/features of 6 pictured objects.

5. To demonstrate effectiveness, by Progress Reporting Period 3 (June 2014), 75% of students in the cohort should be able to state 3 or more attributes/features of 6 pictured objects.
*Obtain informal assessments 4x/year (BOY, Progress Report 1, Progress Report 2, EOY).

Professional Practice Goal:

I will increase my content knowledge of Evidence Based Practice in the area of vocabulary skills in preschool students by researching developmental norms and the Expanding Expression Tool (EET), as well as creating/finding and implementing 6 different activities related to the beads on the EET strand by June 2015.

Action Steps:

1. Research evidence-based instructional strategies that target vocabulary development in preschool-aged students, including the Expanding Expression Tool.

Freebie Alert:
The informal assessment sheets I am using to track student performance can be downloaded as a freebie HERE. My plan is to have students describe 6 different objects 4x in the year...Beginning of the Year (BOY), Progress Report 1 (PR1), Progress Report 2 (PR2), and End of the Year (EOY). My plan is to repeat the first 6 words at the end of the year to get a good estimate of progress. My prompt is "Tell me everything you know about a ___" and I give the student the EET strand. The sheets look like this:

For those of you who are new to the evaluation system, I hope this information is helpful! I think once you have one evaluation cycle "under your belt," it will be easier to write and implement new plans!

I'm curious...Is your district following this evaluation system or are you doing something different? If you are doing a similar evaluation system, what are your SLGs and PPGs?

Monday, February 3, 2014

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links to Amazon.com for your convenience.
It feels like FOREVER since I've actually had the chance to sit down and share with you what I've been doing in my speech room! Before Christmas, my son came home telling me about a book that his preschool teacher read to him. It sounded fun! The next week, a co-worker had it out in her pile of snow themed books and I had to check it out. Sneezy the Snowman is now one of my all-time favorite snowman books!

I encourage you to head over to Amazon and use the "look inside" feature. You won't be disappointed! In the story, Sneezy keeps looking for things to make him less cold. The first thing he does is drink hot cocoa. Many of my students can relate this...it is a fairly common activity post-snow play! If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed that we used Hot Cocoa Speech (a very fun freebie) by Lauren over at Busy Bee Speech:

I used cotton balls because we're not supposed to give food to students...well, technically there is a loophole. A permission slip must be signed by the parent of EVERY student in the group. It just so happens that one of the teachers with whom I work had already sent home a permission slip for marshmallows! So, after reading the story to that class, we discussed ways to warm up and what we like to eat with our hot cocoa. The kids made this craft (the pattern is from Mailbox Magazine) to bring home:

Every January, I target /s/ blends with my articulation students. Why January? Well, it's the perfect opportunity to target the sound in a naturalistic way! There are just about 100 ready-to-go target words! Here are just a few: snow, snowman, snowball, skate, scarf, sled, slide, slip, slippery, skid...You get the idea! So, with my articulation groups, we made this snowman craftivity:

For the snowman, I used a printable page from Tales of a First Grade Teacher. I got the photos from Phonology Roundup by Super Duper (I got the book that comes with a CD ROM). I printed 2 pages per sheet of paper so the pictures would be smaller. We glued the target words on and, in some cases, added some bonus words (sticks, snowflakes, scarf)!

And that pretty much sums up my week last week! I'd love to hear from you. Have you read "Sneezy the Snowman"? If so, what do you think of it?

I work as a school based speech-language pathologist in New Bedford, MA. I work primarily with students in preschool and kindergarten. I'm also the mom of a very sweet little boy who takes up much of my free time.